wrt IDNA2008 migration (was: IDN processing-related security considerations for draft-ietf-websec-strict-transport-sec)

Mon Oct 3 00:41:27 CEST 2011

Jefsey and dear colleagues,
I frankly think we share the same sun but are planets apart with John (hi! ,
so far away John - thanks for what you did!).

I therefore do not see the need for us to try to spend our weak resources to
make these people understand what we achieved together, what we are doing,
and more than anything else what we need. They are just not interested for
most, and the friendly ones just do not understand how they could "rock the
mammoth".

"Perhaps that would have been the right answer but, again, it wasn't what
the WG decided on" (John!)

The WG decided nothing! The charter decided it (irt. Unicode and mapping)
and the Internet had already decided the rest ("too much calls for
subsidiarity").

Our IUusersdebated question is "do we keep pretending we are dismayed yet
cooperating Internet lead users, and trying to help ? or do we consider that
our interest lies in the Intersem, that we are mainly interested in it, and
that however keep being concerned by Telecoms and Internet issues for being
part of the data and content oriented communications strata below?".

Frankly, John Klensin is by far the most advanced and open minded one in
terms of our architectural requirements. Are we happy with RFC 6055? What
does IAB provides us with? Vint Cerf did move with Google+, IAB not. Unicode
not. IETF not. ICANN not. It clearly shows that it is Google and us, and
probably - further - on Google vs. us.

This is why I vote for clarification and efficiency and I claim being an
"Intersem user", relating with the IETF rather than contributing to it. Even
if the Intersem is still at exploration, prespecification, prototype
development stage, I do agree that this will clarify the issues and most
probably permit us to better help IETF-men through occasional summaries and
reports published as informational RFCs.

Mark and John are right. Now we have: XML 1.1 for five years, IPv6 for 15
years, IDNA2008 for two years, and still a 1983 Internet (28 years). And
nothing moves. This is because the politically correct use is still the
decentralized master/slave dumb end to end use of the RFC 3935 architecture,
and it is still accepted by users. They achieved the maximum  Unicode and
IETF could do. Either we are happy at their Internet level or we move to the
next net stratum.

Best and thanks to all for the Internet and your netkeeping.
But I need to move up!
Portzamparc.

2011/10/2 John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com>

>
>
> --On Saturday, October 01, 2011 17:27 -0700 Mark Davis ☕
> <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:
>
> > The third choice, of course, was to maintain backwards
> > compatibility with 2003 for all characters in Unicode 3.2, and
> > just extend the same principles to new characters. That is a
> > much easier migration path...
>
> Unfortunately, that level of compatibility would have
> permanently doomed those who believe that ZWJ and ZWNJ (and some
> other "map to nothing" cases) to permanently living with
> distinctions that they consider very important.  Perhaps that
> would have been the right answer but, again, it wasn't what the
> WG decided on.
>
> > We've seen this before. XML 1.1 only had a small
> > breaking-compatibility changes, but those changes were enough
> > to completely doom it.
>
> Although the jury is still out, the same could be said for IPv6.
> To the extent that analogy is relevant, one might suggest that
> there weren't enough perceived benefits in XML 1.1 and IPv6 to
> justify dealing with the incompatibilities... or the conversion
> and deployment costs whether or not the incompatibilities
> existed.  It is harder to prove that the incompatibilities alone
> are to blame.
>
> On the other hand, if strict backward-compatibility with
> deployed technologies were always the right answer, we wouldn't
> need to be having discussions about conversions of
> tungsten-filament incandescent lighting to CFLs and LEDs because
> we would still be using candles and gas or, to use an older
> analogy, we would be worried about a rather different sort of
> pollution and waste problem in our cities than emissions from
> automobiles.
>
>    john
>
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